minimum wage

So on Thursday, for the first time in company history, McDonald’s inverted the iconic “M” on several of its restaurants in recognition of – and in partnership with - International Women’s Day. "W" for "Women, get it?

Pay your workers a higher salary and you’ll get more people wanting to join your company. Yeah, we were floored by that one, too. The sharpest economic minds would never have predicted anything so revolutionary.

At Labor 411 we believe that if a person works a full time job, he or she should be able to get by in this life without extra monetary assistance. Living in poverty should not be the punishment for working a low-skills job, but soon-to-be-Labor-Secretary Andrew Puzder doesn’t seem to share that sentiment. A former employee of Puzder’s Hardee’s/Carl’s Jr. fast food chain recently wrote an op-ed piece that ran in the Chicago Tribune, and it tells a frightening tale of labor abuse and gives us a glimpse of the Puzder era to come.

Looking beyond the fact that incoming labor secretary Andrew Puzder made more in one day ($17,192) than one of his Hardee’s/Carl’s Jr. employees made in one year ($15,130), the numbers become even more frightening when safety comes into play. The very man who is about to be in charge of protecting workers across the country ran a business (CKE Restaurant Holdings) that saw 98 safety violations from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) since the year he took over, and fines to boot.

Ahhh Florida, the land of sunshine, retirees and gators. Oh, and wage theft. It turns out that Florida’s Trump-supporting Attorney General, Pam Bondi, has not brought a single minimum wage enforcement action against bad employers in five years in the Sunshine State. And it’s not because there haven’t been legitimate cases.

On Tuesday, June 21 workers in Washington, D.C. celebrated a monumental victory when lawmakers gave final approval for a $15 minimum wage. A unanimous vote by the D.C. Council puts the city on track to raise the minimum wage from $10.50 an hour to $15 by 2020 in hopes to improve living conditions for the city’s working poor.

The unaffordability of rent in the United States has become a well-documented phenomenon of late. Another recent study has shown that a two-bedroom rental is virtually unaffordable to people making the national minimum wage. This makes you wonder: How can these people possibly get by without working themselves to the bone?